A few thoughts this morning about pride, humility, gratitude and home.
I remember sitting with my wife late one evening, the two of us in a hospital reception area, awaiting word from the doctor concerning whether the surgery to remove a rare cancerous tumor from our son Jacob's leg had been successful. This was his fifth operation in half as many years. Four times the tumor had returned. Jacob had spent the better part of sixth through eighth grade either in a wheel-chair or a body cast. The operation had gone longer than we anticipated. By now even the last attendant had left the waiting room. Carolyn and I were alone. There was nothing more to say that we hadn't said to one another a hundred times already, so we sat in silence as the minutes past. Then Carolyn reached out her hand to me. "We're so lucky," she said. "Life is such a gift."
Whenever someone asks me (or I ask myself) "What did I do to deserve this," the answer is almost always, "Nothing." We did nothing to deserve being born, nothing to deserve our inheritance of human pain and joy.
The word human has a telling etymology. In fact, all the words that relate to it are illuminating: Human; humane; humanitarian; humor; humility; humble; and, humus. From dust to dust, we live and move and have our human being. Our kinship is a mortal kinship. The mortar of mortality binds us fast to one another.
For this sobering reason alone, life requires not only a measure of humility, but also a leavening sense of humor. My favorite line from all of theology is G. K. Chesterton's quip, "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly." By the same token, we fall on account of our gravity. Just a little lower than the angels, we have no excuse not to laugh at our pretensions to grandeur. And just a little higher than the most humble creature, we cannot afford to forget our mortal origins and destiny.
Our home, the good earth, is composed of humus also; our fate, interwoven with the fate of the world in which we dwell. To this extent, we share a create kinship with our earthly abode. In us the earth is quickened, that its goodness may be felt and known. As Genesis also reminds us, part of our human charge lies in tending our home and keeping it. We do this for our own sake; humility enhances our lives rather than muting or diminishing them. Pride, on the other hand, estranges us from our creator and one another. We forget that the dust of kings mingles with the dust of paupers. By enticing us to lord over both creature and creation, the sin of pride separates us from the ground of our being. This is especially true of pride stemming from an idolatry of knowledge. Wisdom teaches that we are far more alike in our ignorance than we differ in our knowledge. Yet among the things we know for sure is that the same sun sets on each of our horizons. We may be "valiant dust" as Shakespeare puts it, but whether we perceive ourselves as being spun of star dust or fashioned from earthly loam, the human pilgrimage may wind down a million paths but all roads alike lead to the grave.
By one reading, this inevitability renders meaning moot. For most of us, however, knowing that we must die makes the search for meaning mandatory. Here the virtue of humility serves us-as well as our neighborhood and neighbors-not by promoting pretensions of majesty, but by teaching the wisdom of ministry. As a priesthood and prophethood of all believers (to borrow Unitarian ethicist James Luther Adams' phrase) our humane work consists of constantly weaving back together a fabric rent by our own sin. Advancing this work, a consciousness of the intimate relationship of humanity to humus not only saves us from one another; it also invests the earth, our home-be it ever so humble-with nothing less than sacramental significance. "Humility is a sense of reverence," as Euripides writes. Reverence for life endows being itself with simple dignity.
Next to "Home sweet home," which in cross-stitch and needlepoint adorns so many homespun icons, no domestic adage is more familiar than "There's no place like home." Its source is the libretto of John Howard Payne's all-but-forgotten operetta, "Clari, the Maid of Milan," from a song titled-appropriately enough-"Home Sweet Home." The complete couplet reads as follows:
'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.
I can certainly subscribe to this. From my tiniest apartment studio to our present parsonage-a spacious Manhattan high rise perched across from the steeple of All Souls-I have loved something about every one of my many homes. I counted them up recently. Typical of today's peripatetic Americans, over my fifty-odd years I have resided for six months or more in twenty different dwelling places: three in Idaho; one in Washington, D. C.; one in Bethesda Maryland; four in Stanford, Woodside and Los Altos, California; three in Cambridge and Concord, Massachusetts; one in Hanover, New Hampshire; and six in New York City. For the past decade, my family has been blessed with a second home as well, in Shelter Island, New York, with a lighthouse in the distance and beyond it the open sea.
When I visit my children at school, I am reminded of how intimate and revealing the most humble home can be. Our eldest son Frank's room at Kalamazoo College is like a rabbit warren, cozy, dark and carpeted with mattresses. Nina's room at Georgetown is a bright, chaotic shrine to friendship, chock-a-block with photographs and momentos. Our youngest son Nathan's room at Blair Academy is papered with edgy posters celebrating the heroes of contemporary adolescent culture. Jacob's room at home is a temple of irony, its walls mocked up with all manner of expressionistic kitsch (He recently found a refrigerator door in the street that will just fit in the last remaining space on his wall). At a recent Stanford reunion, my freshman roommate, Hans Dankers, presented me with a collage of pictures taken in our dorm room more than three decades ago. I had forgotten the life-size headless plaster statue that we used as a clothes rack, but not the red overhead light with its unintentionally ironic stenciled reminder, "Sex alone is not love."
One reason there is no place like home is that no place is more completely ours. Some say that we are what we eat. More aptly, we are what we keep. The amalgam of belongings we collect and display at home both illustrates our past and presents it as a composite work in progress, as unique as individual identity itself, each of us a living canvass layered with patinas of memory. Yet there is another part to the saying: "Be it ever so humble, there is no place like home." What happens when we create living spaces for ourselves that boast of our material accomplishments, advertising good and expensive taste? When we return every nightfall to roam through pleasures and palaces-when our home is anything but humble-for those of us who would bring God home or hope to discover God there, is this cause for celebration or concern?
One can divide the seven deadly sins into two groupings, sins of the flesh and sins of the spirit. Because their wounds are often self-inflicted rather than inflicted on others, the fleshly sins (laziness, gluttony, and lust) are generally considered less deadly than are the sins of the spirit (avarice, envy, anger and pride). For instance, when we act on our laziness, we literally do nothing. When we eat too much or waste fifteen minutes of our life hoping that some neighbor in the apartment building across from ours will undress before she closes the bedroom curtains, nine times out of ten the world will look the other way. On the other hand, when we explode in anger or indulge in the kind of backstabbing that envy may foster, our sins come out into the open, exposing the condition of our souls. In one sense, that makes sins of the flesh more insidious than sins of the spirit. Neither the world nor we are as likely to detect their subtle tyranny over our souls.
Pride falls into its own special category. When pride is reflected in our mirrors, not only do we miss seeing it for what it is; we also tend-fittingly enough-to boast in it. Given that humility as well is far easier to boast of than to practice, it is also useful for anyone who dares to preach on pride to illustrate his preachments with examples from his own life.
From personal experience I know that, in one of its many disguises, pride wears the robes of judgement. By observing others I am confident that it holds true for me as well that we are attractive to no one but ourselves when, by damning others, we play God. One of our congregants gave up gossip for Lent this year. I can think of almost nothing more difficult. Though I tell people that I read them for the sports pages, I feed my appetite for gossip almost every day by devouring two New York City tabloids. My wife has pointed out to me how often I chuckle when reading some particularly salacious tidbit. Though this pinches my own heart, far worse is when I indulge in back-biting, delighting with others in sharing our condescending disappointment in the behavior of colleagues, friends or family members. Yet I couldn't tell you how often I have quoted from the pulpit Jesus' injunction to "judge not, lest ye be judged," or cautioned against throwing the first stone while having it at hand in my own pocket.
In another of its manifestations, pride, paradoxically, serves as a cloak for low-self-esteem. Some folks given to self-aggrandizement are not covering for their sense of insecurity, but precious few fall into this category. Name-dropping illustrates this perfectly. Clever insecure people can even name-drop and feign humility in the same breath.
Let me share something that happened to me during my first year of ministry. I was officiating at the funeral of Thomas Finletter, past Secretary of the Air Force. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Norman Mailer were offering the eulogies. In our church parlor before the service-mustering every bit of my twenty-nine years worth of authority-I instructed the participants as follows: "Norman Schlesinger will speak first, and you, Arthur, will follow." To which Mailer replied, "You're not nervous are you, kid?" This little story is a perfect example of pride parading about in humble drag.
My preferred sins are sloth and gluttony, but pride abets both. Take the sin of sloth. It may not seem that way-few people boast of their laziness-but indolence and pride are roommates. Whenever I choose not to do something simply because I don't feel like doing it, choosing instead to play life by my own narrow set of rules, I exclude myself from duty in a gesture of superiority. My rationalizations may seem self-serving even as they are certainly self-driven, but they have a cumulative diminishing effect on my soul. I have noticed of other people-especially as they grow older-that by avoiding things that may not please them, over time, with fewer and fewer activities falling outside of this category, the circle of their lives closes in upon them. My own indolence tells me to ignore this observation. After all, if I can somehow weasel free from engagements that don't guarantee some pleasure, I can liberate my life from pain. I can avoid the dangers of disappointment and embarrassment, and especially the risk of discovery. Of course, the risk of discovery cuts both ways. I may avoid being discovered for who I am, but also, less happily, I preclude myself from the discovery of meaning beyond that of my own survival.
For you, humility may not be as central to bringing God home to your life as it has been for me. In fact, people who have had the pride beaten out of them may discover self-esteem to be far more important than humility to the advancement of their own spiritual search. If a dose of humility enhanced my self-worth, for another a double-shot of pride might be necessary to work the same change. Without a healthy sense of self-esteem, we may not feel worthy enough to invite God into our homes. I know of women who accept humiliation as if it were their birthright, and others who argue angrily that indeed it is just that. For Jesus or anyone to tell a person who is already empty of self that she should empty herself and be filled is nothing less than cruel. Far from being sins, Black Pride, Gay Pride, and Feminist Pride are in fact virtues. Perhaps one can go to a store and redeem a coupon that isn't worth anything, but the same does not hold true for a human life. We may go from dust to dust, but our life need not be ashes in between.
Nonetheless, the pride that divides us from others and keeps us from receiving the gift of life with humble gratitude cannot help but diminish both us and our world.
Before he died, my father chose the words for his tombstone. Knowing that a slab of solid granite would long outlast living memory, he pondered what message to post for strangers who might visit his neighborhood some century hence. I wasn't privy to his thoughts, but from the words he chose I have an inkling of them. Remembering that when we wander through graveyards, we reflect on our own mortality, rather than filling the space on his little pyramid with vainglorious information, he preferred to strike a more universal chord. As "final instructions," the words my father left for future generations to ponder are more than worthy of the splendid stone into which we carved them.
I never knew a man who felt self-important in the morning
after spending the night in the open on an Idaho mountainside
under a star-studded summer sky.
Don't forget to spend some time in nature,
where you can be a witness to the wonder of God.
Humus; humble; human. Gratitude or pride? How much better it is to feel gratitude than to feel self-important, when we wake up in the morning.
Blessedly Jacob appears to be enjoying a full recovery, but Carolyn was right. We are lucky. Life is an amazing gift. And be it ever so humble, there is no place as magnificent as the earthen home we share. A little humility goes a long way in helping us to appreciate this.
Amen. I love you. May God bless us all.